Venison from Closets: Some Historical Context for Certain Kind of Pasty

Today I just wanted to add a little historical background on the two recipes that provided the general base for my venison pasty, and on the dish as a whole in the period. 

Title page and frontispiece from the 
firth edition of the work

As I mentioned in the modern adaption entry, one of the recipes I based my version on came from Hannah Woolley’s The Queen-Like Closet. The title is part of an interesting bit of period culture. Woolley’s book went to print in 1670 and is a direct reference to a book published fifteen years earlier. The Queens Closet Opened (1655) purported to be the recipe collection of Queen Henrietta Maria, the wife of Charles I. It was first published after the king’s execution, during the rule of Oliver Cromwell and a huge part of its appeal was the idea of laying bare the royal household. A closet or cabinet was the most private area of a noble, or in this case royal, house; it promised secret and powerful knowledge - a Cabinet in modern politics is an extension of this idea. The housekeeping and cookery book, whether it contained the Queen’s recipes or not, was very popular going through ten printings before the end of the century. Woolley who was generally writing for readers outside the noble class was using this context to help sell her recipes.

Looking at her instructions “To make a Venison Pasty” in The Queen-Like Closet, it is similar to many versions but I picked it partly for its fairly early date and partly for its mostly straightforward instructions. 

The pastry portion of her recipe is much less rich than Charles Carter’s, which I used. She calls for a peck of flour to three (3) lbs of butter and one egg; compare that to the other base recipe which would have eight (8) lbs of butter and 16 eggs for the same amount of flour. She does use cream instead of water to make up her paste. Claret wine is used to make what is called a leer: it is poured into the vent you make in the top of the pastry; that is the only seasoning other than salt and pepper. 

This basic seasoning minus the wine is all that is found in a lot of the period recipes for this dish, including the one in The Compleat City and Country Cook (1732) by Charles Carter. He was a professional cook for a number of nobles according to the preface to his work: he lists a duke, as well as a handful of earls and generals amongst his patrons. He served them abroad in military and diplomatic posts, as well as at their homes in England. An interesting development in cookery books can be seen in later compilations of his recipes. A third edition from 1749 is called The London and Country Cook: Or, Accomplished Housewife; Carter is still first-billed as author but the titlepage also proclaims that it is “revised and much improved by a GENTLEWOMAN; many years housekeeper to an eminent merchant in the City of London.” For me at least, it appears to be a part of the small shift towards female writers, as well as being an example of the fairly new practice of a commercial author writing to a reader when both were not necessarily associated with a noble house. 

The frontispiece from the 3rd edition
with obvious direction to female 
readers

As far as his actual venison pasty goes, the other major difference in his as compared to Woolley’s is his leer: like many other period recipes, he first breaks and boils the bones and pours that into the vent in the pastry. However, he does this after the pastry comes out of the oven. The collagen in the bones would make a jelly that is common in savoury English pies today. 

Overall and once again, it is quite a simple dish for the period and I was surprised at how many authors at least mention it, as well as how many have fairly close variations on it. Similarly, it shows up in quite a few bills of fare included in period cookery books. 

Sir Kenelm Digby was among many other things a diplomat, natural scientist and writer in the first half of the seventeenth century. In his writing, he uses the venison pasty a number of ways and as a reference in other dishes. The Closet of the Eminently Learned Sir Kenelme Digbie Kt. Opened, was published apparently with his son's permission after his death in 1671. In it he tells how to use the bottom of a venison pasty – the crust - like you would bread, usually to thicken dishes. In his general instructions on pottages, he suggest putting “a piece of the bottom of a Venison Pasty” in from the start of the cooking. When telling the reader how “To stew a Rump of Beef” he says: “Then rub it well with Pepper grosly beaten, and salt; just as you would do, to season a Venison pasty.” As part of the recipe “To make an excellent Hare-pye" he instructs the reader to “Set it to bake with houshold-bread, (or in an oven, as a Venison pasty) for eight or ten hours.” The point being that Digby assumed that most people who were cooking in the seventeenth century would be familiar with a venison pasty and to such a point that he does not actually give a recipe for it. 

The famous diarist Samuel Pepys, who wrote regularly for almost ten years beginning in 1660, tells of sharing many venison pasties at parties and gatherings. He was the administrator for the Royal Navy during the reigns of Charles II and James II. He recorded one instance of going to Vice Admiral Sir Minnes’ abode, then names four other members of the nobility and says: “all of us dined on a venison pasty and other good meat.” He usually would rate the pasties he ate over the years as “good” or “bad” but one time, dining at the house of Sir William Penn (the father of the founder of Pennsylvania) he had “a damned venison pasty, that stunk like a devil.” 

May all our venison pasties not stink like sulphur and such. This weekend or possibly early next week I will be trying a fast day recipe from the eighteenth century – Hannah Glasse’s “Peas-Soop.”